BY JOHN NASH

Dear Reader, it is time to reach for the ivory panic bars on either side of your commode. We bring to you a sensational revelation. On 15th February, The Guardian dramatically revealed, “WWF helping facilitate trade in polar bear fur, investigation reveals. Wildlife charity backs policy of exploitation of small number of some endangered species for economic purposes – such as trophy hunting”, written by Adam Cruise. 

Oh, no, not the WWF of the cuddly panda logo… FFS, it’s enough to make your faith in humans drain away faster than those grand promises in the Liebour Party manifesto. However, thankfully, the world is not coming to an end because we can also reveal that in this great WWF revelation, the revealing Guardian also forgot to reveal that Adam Cruise is well-known as the sometime acting CEO of the Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting, that hate-mongering parasite of time and money operated by the odious Portuguese rodent, Eduardo Gonçalves. 

Like Tequila, this rather unguarded Guardian article should be salt rimmed or consumed with a large pinch of salt, and enjoyed, not as journalism (for, sadly, it is not), but as a classic example of the art of colorectal khoomei. Khoomei, as all discerning and erudite readers of CSM will know, is the fascinating technique of Mongolian throat singing, in which various warblings at different pitches are simultaneously produced by the throat. In the colorectal khoomei version, the artistry is produced at the other end of the alimentary system and Dr Cruise, a Doctor of Philosophy rather than of arctic ecology or materialism, is a noted performer, conflating humerus with coccyx for hours on end without seemingly taking a single breath of reality. This performance will go down well among the lettuce molesters in the Westminster Asylum.

And this is the real news in this article. It reveals the familiar problem that Country Squires, farmers, proper conservationists, ecologists, field sports enthusiasts, hunters and indigenous people face all around the world – colorectal khoomei is entertaining and enjoyable for the listeners, but has absolutely no meaning in the real world, let alone about wildlife and its welfare. It uses wildlife to gently massage listeners’ feelings – their welfare – rather than the welfare of rural and remote environments. When the house lights come up, the performance can be seen for what it is – extreme self-indulgence and emotional self-abuse. 

The Guardian weasel talk this time is headlined “the WWF refusing to ban the trophy hunting of polar bears”. According to Dr Cruise and his origami of facts, “The wildlife charity WWF has been working to support the trade in polar bear fur at the same time as using images of the bears to raise money”. It’s only fair to point out that at least the WWF raises funds to actually try and help wildlife – Dr Cruise’s CBTH uses pictures of a baby polar bear to raise funds on its website, too, but unlike the global WWF, the Westminster woodworm CBTH has never apparently saved a single animal in its miserable existence, let alone any polar bears. Perhaps someone simply trousers the money and puts it down to campaign expenses.

Cruise then continued the Guardian piece with a statement totally unconnected with trophy hunting – “Polar bears are severely affected by the loss of Arctic Sea ice, which makes seeking prey harder and forces the bears to use more energy. In some regions, polar bears are showing signs of declining physical condition, having fewer cubs, and dying younger”. I am sure they are, but not where they are hunted in Nunavut, Canada. There, the locals are up to their frozen little wazoos in polar bears, with far too many of the beautiful but dangerous ursine beasts to survive all year round without starving or trying to lunch on the locals. (Don’t tell the holy cardboard eaters, but polar bears are not actually vegetarians.)  

So, the Canadian Wildlife service, the IUCN specialist polar bear group, scientists and Inuit leaders (for whom the bears are respected and sacred) work out the local bear-carrying capacity each year, then tags are issued to hunt the surplus, one for each bear. Those tags are offered to the Inuit in the affected coastal villages, often by lottery because there are more hunters than bears. The 300-400 surplus bears are thus removed by the Inuit who have always traditionally had the right to hunt and eat the bears. They can also sell tagged furs to buyers in places like China where they are admired for what they are – a beautiful, sustainable, recyclable natural product. Whatever the hunting method, back in Canada, the meat has to go to the local community by law.

Some tag holders can elect to allow a visiting trophy hunter to “hunt the tag” on their behalf, on foot or dog-sled, take the shot, and if allowed, take home the fur. This, of course, does not affect the bear numbers hunted – the Inuit tag holder would have shot the same bear anyway – but it does bring in a huge financial benefit, in trophy hunting fees, to the local communities. It also shows that claims like, “Banning the sale of bear trophy hunts would save bears” is simply dishonest. Sales of surplus bear hunts are important where jobs and income sources are limited, and banning the sale of legal polar bear fur would mean locals having to harvest large numbers of something else less valuable to sell or suffer a loss of income. But, whatever, that won’t save bears – surplus bears would still be managed and shot, but then for no income. 

It would be particularly stupid to relocate the bears to places where they have already died out from natural causes – the incomers would face the same fate. So, what’s going on?

There are 19 populations of polar bears in various places – 3 populations are in decline, 2 are increasing, 4 are stable and 10 populations are data-deficient. Then there is this, “Since 2004 we have been told that polar bear numbers in Western Hudson Bay have been steadily declining, but a new study made public in 2023 reveals that this isn’t actually true. In the State of the Polar Bear Report 2023, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) on International Polar Bear Day, zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford provides the details on this explosive news”. More specifically, it means that trophy hunting is more than sustainable in Hudson Bay and strictly controlled by thousands of knowledgeable people – locals, ecologists and a large posse of professional scientists; all part of responsible, pragmatic polar bear wildlife management that every rural person will understand.

This is all apparently wrong according to the Gruntian and we must rather take the advice of this anti-hunting political philosopher, sworn bunny hugger and flag waver for the UK’s most prolific hate-monger. To oil his point further, Cruise added that the IUCN and WWF decisions (not to oppose sustainable hunting) are “contentious” and to emphasise it, he threw a trump on the table with this: “Robert Thompson, an Iñupiat resident and polar bear guide from Kaktovik, Alaska, said: “We didn’t sell these animals for 10,000 years and that’s why they are still here – we didn’t have a commercial need” Robert also added, “There can be a good income by taking people to view the animals – and that is sustainable. I think if we just shot the bears to have money, pretty soon we wouldn’t have any more bears and then that’s the end of it,” words so utterly untrue and coincidentally identical to the propaganda of the CBTH on the other side of the world that they might have been written by the devious hate-monger Gonçalves himself…

Clever stuff indeed, except that you might also like to know that Robert Thompson hails from North Alaska, where the coastal locals hunt bears and whales under quotas from the Marine Mammal Protection Act controlled by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Robert is an eco-guide who takes photo-tourists out to see polar bears in the local reserve boneyard where they gather in great numbers to feast on the remains of the bowhead whales hunted (…pass the smelling salts, vicar) by Robert’s neighbours. Robert’s “eco-tours” are actually under scrutiny by the USFWS at the moment because of their huge flying tourist carbon cost and disturbance of the bears… pots and kettles, Robert, old son. Meanwhile, two thousand kilometres away – Hudson Bay, Canada, is where the actual “tagged” trophy hunts take place that turn Dr Cruise into St Vitus in the Guardian.  

Undeterred, Cruise offered further slippery lubricant for his story, a helpful quotation from Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud, President of One Planet Education Networks, an organisation not known for conserving many polar bears either, “I think the public will be even more than surprised, perhaps shocked. I know that it’s the sort of thing that I have difficulty getting my head around.”  

It’s really not that difficult, Jean-Paul.

Meanwhile, the less hysterical WWF actually said, “If, at some stage in the future, polar bear populations become so diminished by climate change and habitat loss, and/or if international trade presents a greater threat, we would want to revisit the Cites listing issue. But we’re not at that point.” The situation is under surveillance and the WWF also points out that a ban on the very limited and closely regulated hunting would damage the livelihoods of Indigenous communities, noted above. 

Having built a polar bear horror story out of gaslight and straw, Dr Cruise then went on to add to it the usual menagerie of CBTH wallet-tugging favourites… “WWF has also lobbied against granting full protection under Cites to other animals including elephants, hippos, giraffes and rhinos. This was particularly evident at the 2022 Cites meeting, where WWF lobbied successfully for changing the listing of Namibia’s white rhino population from full protection under appendix I to the less restrictive appendix II.”  Clearly, you are being led by the nose to believe that the evil WWF, having sold the innocent polar bears for 30 pieces of silver to evil trophy hunters, also exposes the charismatic African quartet to a similar annihilation.  

Except, of course, that a comparatively few elephants and hippos are legally shot as surplus or dangerous pests in Africa, Southern giraffes are rising in numbers and are raised by ranchers for hunting and meat, while a few rhinos have to be sold to hunters in order to pay for guarding the rest, thanks to the idiotic ban on selling sustainable, harvested rhino horn – a ban brought in by the likes of Dr Cruise and the rest of the eco-parasites. A ban on trophy hunting of these animals would visit a disaster upon them.

The true tragedy here is that apparently about 168,000 trees are murdered every year to print the Guardian and this kind of Cruise crapola. They could have been turned into 2.5 billion toilet rolls and ultimately they would served a more honest and useful purpose.

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John Nash grew up in West Cornwall and was a £10 pom to Johannesburg in the early 1960’s. He started well in construction project management, mainly high-rise buildings but it wasn’t really Africa, so he went bush, prospecting and trading around the murkier bits of the bottom half of the continent. Now retired back in Cornwall among all the other evil old pirates. His interests are still sustainable resources, wildlife management and the utilitarian needs of rural Africa. John is the co-author of Dear Townies with the Editor and his book, “Animal Rights, complete and utter bullsh*t” both available on Amazon.